Malagash

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Facing her father’s imminent death, Sunday, the young protagonist of Comeau’s affecting novella, has devised a plan. Surreptitiously recording their conversations, Sunday will transcribe his every word and keep his memory alive via a computer virus. Once completed, the virus “will say his words for him; it will copy them into memory. Into the long stretches of unused storage. Like an echo in an empty room. Like the words written on the back of an old photograph, hidden by the frame.” Sunday’s quest to preserve her father in code poignantly explores how everyone confronts grief in his or her own idiosyncratic way. Known primarily for darkly comic novels and the webcomic A Softer World, Comeau effortlessly switches gears to expose the trauma, heartbreak, and humor in loss. Sunday’s efforts to transform her father into “a ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark” is an immensely touching tribute to a very human struggle with mortality.

October 15, 2017

Canadian author Comeau, whose work ranges from the novel Lockpick Pornography to the webcomic A Softer World, here offers a spare, ice pick-sharp look at coping with death. With her mother and brother Simon ("the waif"), Sunday has come to tiny Malagash, Nova Scotia, because her father wants to die in his hometown. The rest of the family is broken up, but Sunday is a girl with a mission: she intends to record everything her father says in his last days, not to create audio files to remember him by but to write a computer virus that will spread throughout the world, allowing him to live on "like an echo in an empty room." It's an intriguing premise--we often think of enduring through empires or art, but here's a brave new techie approach--and Comeau makes it persuasive as Sunday bustles about, cool and determined and entirely likable. Recording everything from her father's meditative comments ("A weight will lift") to his silly jokes ("They better not have chickens in heaven. Chickens are idiot eagles and I hate them"), Sunday finally enlists Simon in her project, which meets with bittersweet success. VERDICT A fine fable for all smart readers.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2017
A young girl tries to cheat death with a computer virus.Sunday is writing a computer virus that will allow her dad to live forever. She records everything he says, then transcribes the recordings, then embeds the transcriptions in code that will spread from system to system--forever. In the meantime, Sunday's dad is dying of cancer. Every day, Sunday, her mom, and her younger brother go to the hospital to visit him. That's where Sunday makes her recordings. The virus is the most interesting thing here, but this is no Transcendence: nobody's consciousness gets uploaded to a hard drive. Instead, Sunday and her family grieve; Sunday and her brother grow closer; their mother recedes into her own sadness; and the virus gradually comes along. Comeau's (One Bloody Thing After Another, 2010) novel is short and spare, with chapters that rarely last more than a few pages. The writing is blunt, slightly truncated, in Sunday's narration. "I thought this was going to be easy," she tells us. "I would write down my father's words, and he would live forever. But the more I record, the more I realize I am missing." Comeau resists sentimentality, and, given his subject matter, that's no small feat--but, given that same subject matter, he can't be entirely successful. Unfortunately, the work has the slightly flattened aspect of a YA novel. Plus there's the inescapable fact that this subject matter is well-traversed: computers or no computers, parents die, and they'll go on dying. Despite sympathetic characters and a crisp narrative style, Comeau's latest seems to defy innovation.

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